To Luther Tillman, this looked like more than an act of feeble vengeance perpetrated by some kin of those who died at the hotel.
With shingles, rafters, joists, studs, wallboard, doors, cabinets, furniture having been rendered into ashes and windblown to the far reaches of the night, the concrete slab issued a phosphorescent glow, as if from moonlight, but the moon remained submerged in clouds. The pale glow was retained heat, still so intense that window glass lay on the concrete in glistering puddles, just now starting to shape into whorls and ripples, and all the metal of ovens and refrigerator and cook pots—of even the furnace made for fire—lay in low half-melted masses, radiant and strange.
For a distance of fifteen yards, the snow around the residence had gone to steam and water, and the frozen ground had turned to mud. Farther out, a mantle of ash and filigrees of soot darkened winter’s coverlet. In front of the house, the pair of old starburst pines stood stripped of greenery, jagged and bristling and black and smoking, like ancient totems, the ground around them littered with their dismembered limbs transformed to charcoal.
The firemen had been defeated before they arrived, had been able to do nothing but watch the last of the inferno burn itself out. They were still present, however, as though superstitiously expecting that such an unnaturally fierce blaze might leap up anew even though it had consumed everything combustible.
Out where the driveway met the county road, propped against the mailbox, was a message from the arsonists, white letters painted on a slab of plywood: BURN IN HELL, YOU MURDEROUS BITCH.
Vance Saunders, who years earlier had been in charge of fire control on an aircraft carrier, said no ordinary accelerant could fuel such a fire. “Even had they soaked every room with gasoline,” he told Luther, “she’d never go up like this went up. There was something kind of napalm about this.”
After the firemen left, Lonny Burke walked with Luther to their cruisers. “If we give this a case number, then everyone who knew anyone who died at the hotel—he’s a suspect in this here arson.”
“Whoever did this, they aren’t county people,” Luther said.
Puzzled, Lonny said, “Who are they, then?”
Recalling how the FBI had been pulled out of the house by a man from the U.S. Department of Justice, their investigation prematurely terminated, Luther said, “Maybe we won’t ever know…and maybe we don’t need to.”
After Lonny returned to his patrol route, Luther slowly drove home through this high-latitude night, where, in clear weather, he sometimes stood transfixed by a sky coruscating with the aurora borealis. He knew that those luminous streamers of color were only charged solar particles bombarding the upper atmosphere and flowing along Earth’s magnetic lines of force, but the sight never failed to fill him with wonder. You could know the science of a thing and still find the phenomenon mysterious and mystical, and feel small and vulnerable in the face of it.
He was only halfway home when he phoned Rob Stassen, with whom he had searched Cora Gundersun’s house earlier. When Rob answered, not yet abed, Luther said, “It’s me.”
Talking around a mouthful of something, Robbie said, “Yessir. Just watchin’ some dumb TV.”
“Is that a cud?”
“Doritos and guacamole.”
“Listen, did you tell anyone what we found in Cora’s place?”
“Checked out, came home, crashed. Haven’t talked to anyone.”
“No one at all? It’s important.”
“No one. Except maybe myself.”
“What about Melanie?”
“She’s off in Idaho, visiting her mom—remember?”
“I do now, yes. Cora’s house just burned to the ground.”
“Why am I not surprised? People are stupid. You need me there?”
“No. What I need is you don’t tell anyone we were in that house earlier. No one. Not a word about the journals we found.”
“You got it.”
“I’m dead serious, Robbie.”
“I can hear you are, Sheriff. You spook me a little.”
“Good. We didn’t even have this conversation.”
“What conversation?”
Luther terminated the call.
The closer he got to home, the faster he drove, although he didn’t realize that he expected to discover something gone terribly wrong at his house, with his family, until he arrived and found that all was well.